Actavis Laboratories UT, Inc. was unable to show that patents licensed to Endo Pharmaceuticals Inc. covering its testosterone gel product Fortesta® were invalid as obvious in light of prior art, according to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Therefore, a district court ruling finding that the patents were not obvious was affirmed…
The Federal Court of Justice held that claim construction is the core task of a court dealing with infringement and that this must be done independently from the claim construction as used by the FCJ in a previous nullity decision about that same patent. The Court explicitly stated that there is no legal or factual…
The Finnish Market Court, as the court of first instance, ruled that the reversed burden of proof which is applied in infringement proceedings involving patents granted for manufacturing processes of novel products is also applicable in preliminary injunction matters. As the parties had submitted completely contrary expert opinions, which could not be assessed within the…
The Legal Board of Appeal of the EPO rejected the decision of the examining division that additional claim fees were due at the start of examination for claims added with the response to the international search report under Rule 161(1) EPC, even if at the end of the 31 month period the claims did not…
The recruitment procedure for judges of the Unified Patent Court has been suspended until more is known about the consequences of the UK’s Brexit vote for the Unitary Patent system. Earlier this week, the UPC Preparatory Committee announced the first round of selection of candidates has continued despite the Brexit vote, but ‘the commencement of…
To ensure you don’t miss out on interesting IP law developments reported on our other IP blogs, we will, on a regular basis, provide you with an overview of the top 3 most-read posts from each of our IP law blogs. Here are the top posts from August and September. Top 3 Kluwer Copyright Blog…
A recent Ruling of 9 September 2016 from the Court of Appeal of Barcelona (Section 15) illustrates the risks of defendants taking a “wait and see” attitude in the context of proceedings aimed at liquidating damages. This decision was handed down following an appeal filed by a patentee against a decision from Commercial Court number…
To ensure the continued development of medicinal products which are the result of enormous R&D costs the supplementary protection certificate (‘SPC’) was introduced into EU law in 1993 with the entry into force of the SPC Regulation (Council Regulation (EEC) No 1768/92). After the Ukraine’s declaration of independence, hard work on adopting new legislation began…
This question was tackled by the Full Federal Court of Australia in Kafataris v Davis [2016] FCAFC 134. The patent in suit related to an alternative manner of playing card games. The player could play a primary game while at the same time exercising betting options on a secondary or auxiliary game, either separately from…
Media attention at the English High Court today may have been focussed on the Article 50 challenge but for many patent lawyers operating in the life sciences sector, of equal or greater importance was the handing down of the long-awaited judgment in the Lyrica appeal. To recap briefly, Pfizer was the owner of a patent…
